My biggest project was my Tour de Jeux, a cycling tour of PC gaming spanning 12 posts, 14 games, a handful of videos, and 11,146 words. I got back into cycling during lockdown, hard, and was keen to look at bikes in games and in life. Running alongside the Tour De France, my Tour De Jeux checked out xtreme sports games, strategy games, bicycles in multiplayer shooters, cute indie walking simulators and visual novels, childhood adventures, and even a game powered by riding my real bike, as well as chatting about the Tour, bicycles in general, and my own cycling adventures. At the start of the year, back in the news department, I had a great deal of fun sighing and groaning about NFTs. Publishers were up to rubbish and nonsense but I did at least sometimes enjoy the opportunity to ‘go off’, as the kids say. I was glad to see the terrible ideas start to wither and die until I realised, wait, actually, NFTs are the future, and it’s a fantastic future we should all get behind. So I started writing Non-Fungible Future, a series of young adult cyberpunk novels about teenage cryptorebels saving the dystopian future using NFTs. I especially like that Riders Republic evokes some terrors of cycling. Bikes noisily skid and shudder when pushed too far, threatening to go out of control. Brakes aren’t enough for really steep hills either, leaving you wrestling with an unstoppable skid (the absolute worst feeling on a bike). The field of view pulls out at high speeds too, a slightly out-of-body experience. As someone who fears heights and has lost a little skin to hills, the game has me pulling back in my chair and twisting uncomfortably during some downhill races, so sucked into the screen that I want to get away. I hate it, and that’s great. While some minor legal/moral issues are holding up their launches, you can still read the excerpts and author’s notes I’ve shared from the first two books: 1/1 and Original Content. Speaking of kewl hackers, I also enjoyed celebrating Cyber Monday with a series of daft posts about mirrorshades, knuckle tattoos, and a Swiss army knife for PowerPoint presentations. Because we all know that Cyber Monday is about cyberspace and hackers and cyberpunk and nothing else. I had hoped to do more, and better, but ah it’s okay. I did find it very funny that William Gibson himself responded to chat about mirrorshades as an infosec hazard. Noting the DAO’s buy-in cost, 5arah flipped open her crypto wallet and executed the blockchain authentication gesture tied to her biometrics: pointing a fingergun upwards under her chin as if to splatter her engrams across the infobahn, and pulling the trigger. Transfer complete. She hadn’t just bought access to the private server, she’d bought enough votes to make Elizab.eth cosplay as a totally cringe meme during the next stream. 5arah.eth spat out her gum (Hot Takes flavour, always), cleared her throat, and joined the voice channel. “Guess who’s back, motherfungers.” Honestly, that post exists primarily because I thought a pair of mirrorshades reflecting Solitaire rather than a dystopian skyline would be a funny twist on a classic cyberpunk image. And it is. I enjoyed the process of taking that mirrorshades photo too. I spent ages squished in front of my monitor, staring into my red rear bike light balanced on the corner of my screen, trying to angle reflections just right while holding my phone up and snapping on the selfie camera. This would have been so much easier with a real camera, or an assistant. And on the subject of putting so much more effort into an image than anyone would ever notice or appreciate, I opened up about how often I delight in creating those details. After spending hours capturing one screenshot and 43 seconds of video showing a cat in Morrowind (for a post about a parent modding in the family cat to protect their kids from mudcrabs), I explained that process in my first Screenshot Secrets post. I was glad to have time for Screenshot Saturday Mondays, reviving a column started by Jay Castello then continued by Nat Clayton. Every week, a pick of a dozen-odd interesting screenshots and video clips from indie games which caught my eye on Twitter’s #ScreenshotSaturday share-o-rama. It’s exciting to write, scrolling through hundreds of tweets and seeing the vast range of indie games, and a great way to spot upcoming games we should pay more attention to. I don’t know what will happen after Elon Musk kills Twitter. My new role also gave me time to revive my mission to answer the biggest question: what’s the best thing in video games? A toughie. So each week, I pick two directly comparable things (e.g. “dynamic music or hex grids?”, “ridiculous spell animations or the mangled hands of Ethan Winters?”), examine them, then turn it over to you to vote. We’re still in the first round but surely I will soon have covered every single thing in video games. Maybe at some point I’ll court suggestions for more things. The format has been a fun writing prompt for me, and I’ve very much enjoyed your serious debate in the comments over these serious issues. This bit is from a favourite, What’s better: a level 1 rat, or Alone In The Dark’s jacket inventory? But I’ll tell you what I didn’t do this year: replace the increasingly gross corpse of a mangled old mousepad. Yes, the ruminations on its decay will, I am sorry to say, continue. Certainly nothing to do with me processing grief in a way I think some people might find funny. Could you kill a rat? Can you look at a glossy little lad, grown fat on brewer’s barley and dropped pork scratchings, and put a blade between his bright eyes? I’m asking both physically and emotionally. Have you seen how fast rats move? Have you seen how cute they are? Can you kill one and then keep on killing after the first fleck of blood hits your face? Can you heave aside the sacks of neeps and tatties his family will flee behind? If you can, hey, maybe you’re ready to carve a bloodsoaked path across the land in search of fame, fortune, vengeance, or whatever the hell it is you think you deserve. But if this first step causes you to stumble, Judith knows where you’ll be two days from now. She can’t keep doing this. I have no idea what I’m doing next year, but I didn’t know what I was doing this year either. Let’s find out together. Thanks for reading!
